Junie B. spoke to children, teens and adults

SAN ANTONIO — One of my very favorite memories of being a father of young daughters was the time my wife was reading one of Barbara Park's Junie B. Jones books to us out loud as we drove to the coast. We were laughing so hard it's a wonder I wasn't pulled over for drunk driving.

In fact, the only influence I was under was that of a precocious, opinionated “almost 6-year-old” kindergartener who stars in a series of more than 30 illustrated chapter books first published in 1992.

Park, a longtime resident of Scottsdale, Ariz., died Friday after what news reports called a long battle with ovarian cancer. She was 66.

They tell you one way to ensure your child's success in life is to read to them early and often. But as any parent knows, while there are plenty of wonderful children's books out there, there's plenty of dreck, too.

Park's Junie B. books most definitely fall into the former category.

One of my daughters is in grad school, the other's a college junior, yet several of Junie B.'s grammatical manglings are with us to this day.

We express pleasure in something by saying, “I love those guys.”

When we're in a hurry, we're moving “speedy quick.”

Someone's angry? They're talking in their “huffy breath.”

Junie B. is a girl who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to speak her mind to get it. Here she is in the very first paragraph of the very first book in the series, “Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus”:

“My name is Junie B. Jones. The B stands for Beatrice. Except I don't like Beatrice. I just like B and that's all.”

Later, during her first day of kindergarten, she meets a girl named Lucille: “I like that name Lucille, 'cause guess why? Seals are my favorite animal. That's why.”

During the planning of a Valentine's Day party in “Junie B. Jones and the Mushy Gushy Valentine,” she heartedly endorses a classmate's suggestion for a chain-saw juggler as entertainment: “'Cause who doesn't like chain-saw jugglers? That's what I'd like to know.”

Kacey Griffin, who played the lead in the Magik Theatre's “Junie B. Jones in Jingle Bells, Batman Smells,” said Junie is so popular, people waited longer to meet her than the show itself lasted.

“The show is only, like 45 minutes,” said Griffin, also the theater's academy director.

And it wasn't just kindergarteners.

“We had sixth-graders, teenagers, parents.”

There was a run on Junie B. books in the Central Library this weekend, as word of Park's death spread.

“Parents wanting to introduce, or re-introduce their kids to Junie B.,” suggested Viki Ash, the library's coordinator of children's services.

Although Park found her greatest success writing in the voice of a malapropism-spouting kindergartener (and, later, first-grader), she was an accomplished young-adult author, too. Her book “Skinnybones” won the Texas Bluebonnet Award in 1985, years before Junie B. was “born.” And Ash cites Park's “Mick Harte Was Here” as one of her favorites. It's told by Mick's older sister Phoebe who, in the book's opening paragraphs, dispassionately informs the reader that Mick has died in a bicycle accident.

“I can't think of anything worse than using my brother's accident as the tear-jerking climax to some tragic story,” she writes. “I don't want to make you cry. I just want to tell you about Mick. But I thought you should know right up front that he's not here anymore.”

Unfortunately, the voice behind some of the freshest books in children's literature is also no longer here.